


All Of This

by phrenitis



Category: Fringe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-08
Updated: 2010-12-08
Packaged: 2017-10-14 22:11:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/154015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phrenitis/pseuds/phrenitis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It feels wrong, going through their break up before the relationship has even started, but she reads the history they had in his stuff left behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Of This

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: Season Three, _Entrada_

_“[This is] what happens when we’re incandescent but are not allowed to be, about what we look like when we adore, and, in the end, what it cost.”  
\-- Daphne Gottlieb_

==

“This is yours.” she says, gives him the box – heavier than she’d imagined a few months could be. It feels wrong, going through their break up before the relationship has even started, but she reads the history they had in his stuff left behind.

He takes it quietly, hands far from hers – a box between, and she doesn’t meet his eyes.

==

It goes on for a week, the distance. They work the cases, side by side because she’s okay, she’s _fine_ , but conversation is stilted and awkward moments triumph.

She knows Walter is uncomfortable, can read it in his fidgeting, the way he’ll stand like a bridge between them and pat their arms, talk about atoms and quarks and scientific errors. She brings a box of pastries to the lab, a mistaken gesture, confusion then realization dawning when she sees their horrified expressions. Walter eats them for her sake.

“It’s good. This is good,” he mumbles to no one in particular, over and over until she has to leave the room for him to stop.

==

Peter apologizes a few too many times, and even though she understands all too well (she still hasn’t told him about the other side, about Frank, not _yet_ ), she can’t bring herself to forgive him.

“You saved me,” she says when they’re in the car, alone and silent for miles. “Now I can’t leave.”

She wants to run, but a couple of steps away and she’s too far from the familiar to breathe.

He keeps his eyes on the road, but she feels his tension, the shame. “I could go,” he offers.

She has no answers. Her bed (even with new sheets that smell of nothing), her apartment, her car – his presence is there so solidly, like she’d been sleeping through it, like it was only yesterday that this entire life they’d been leading had been real.

He looks at her then, pained and sorry. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Give me time,” she says, and hopes it’s enough.

==

They study the machine, piecing it together over late nights and with the occasional sense of desperation.

Sometimes he’s too close – the heat of him, the subtle smells, the accidental touch - and everything will be right for a fleeting moment too quick to hold. It leaves her shaken, the what if of them that plays through her mind as she waits for sleep.

Even as she dreads these moments, hates how her mouth goes dry and her stomach drops, she waits for them too.

==

They’re on the roof at the end of the case, and she’s caught suddenly, hooked and flying forward over the ledge as she thinks, _wait, stop_.

He saves her before she plummets, fingers fisted in her shirt, her vest, so tight around her arm it makes her gasp. He hauls her to safety, and for a quiet moment she forgets to move away, and he doesn’t let go. Maybe she turns in to him, or he’s just there, but his hand is still wrapped around her arm, face close to hers as he checks that she’s all right.

“Yeah,” she reassures him. “I’m okay.”

He doesn’t look convinced, but he puts the space back between them, lets her go.

The bruises take weeks to fade.

 

 _-Fin_


End file.
